Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods: Continues in the series’ strong fashion

Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods by Suzanne Collins

The third book in the Gregor series picks up shortly after the last one ends and quickly tosses the reader into familiar territory. Once again, Gregor takes up a task underground in order to save a family member. In the first book it was his father, in book two his sister Boots, and now it’s his mother, who in accompanying him down to the underground contracted a seemingly fatal disease that threatens to wipe out the warmbloods.

As foretold by a prophecy (another familiar element from the other books), Gregor joins a group made up of rats, crawlers, humans, and bats who have put aside (somewhat) their hatred for each other to seek the cure to this plague that strikes them all. The quest will take them deep into a dangerous forest, the only place where the plant that supposedly holds the cure grows.

The strengths of book three are the same as the earlier books. The story moves along smoothly at a quick pace with almost no lagging moments. The main characters continue to grow in complexity, maturing with age and experience as well as revealing previously concealed aspects of personality and experience. The new characters obviously don’t have the same depth, but are also fully drawn as Collins manages to avoid the flatness of character that mars so many other young adult fantasy books, even those that are three times the length and so should have time for more complex characters.

The setting remains somewhat too vague for my liking; as in books one and two I wish Collins had sacrificed a little speed of story for a more vivid sense of place. The plotting in this one is not quite as strong as in the others — a bit more straightforward (though with a nice darkly cynical twist at the end) and containing a few scenes that seem a bit sketchy, not quite fully thought out or drawn out. As in previous books, death is not simply an insincere threat hanging over a quest where you know all will survive. Characters die in this book as they have in others and though Collins in my mind glosses over one a bit too easily, others have more impact, some surprisingly so.

The end of the underground section seems a bit abrupt, but as is usual, Collins doesn’t neatly tie things off in a happy bow. Some questions from book two have been answered, others have not. Some characters have survived but not untouched (Gregor’s father, for instance, has still not fully recovered from the events of book one, a welcome bit of realistic shading). And new questions and problems have arisen. There is at least one more book to come obviously, but there is no sense of padding an over-worked story. The characters and problems remain interesting and in some cases have grown more so. Strongly recommended for older young readers. Younger readers won’t have a problem with following plot, but may be truly frightened by an early vivid scene involving rats in the walls and also may be upset by the deaths that take place.